Archive for the ‘The Making of My Balls’ Category

We got a rejection letter from Apple. Nothing specific – just a reference to the obscenity clause. It says if we can make the necessary changes we should resubmit. It doesn’t list any necessary changes, so maybe we should just resubmit? We sent a reply to Apple asking for clarification and an explanation. We’re going to have to go think about what the right thing to do is.

It’s going to be tough to keep upbeat and positive through this. Putting so much care and effort into a game and having it rejected without clear reason – it stings like a kick to the balls. Speaking of, maybe it’s the right time for another nutshot video! Thank the lord for YouTube. This is how it feels to get an App Store rejection e-mail.Karate Balls! (click to watch)

We’ve entered the most nerve wracking part of the iPhone and iPod Touch development process – waiting for approval from the app store. We did everything we can to ensure approval and now we get to wait and see if we pass the test.

In the mean time, I’ve been working on improvements to memory management while waiting for approval. Also doing some control and UI tweaks. All boring stuff, so how about we entertain you with some more ball shot videos! Let’s go to the world of footballs….

It is a great day in the land of my balls. Three and a half weeks ago this was just a dream. Today we have shipped version 1.0 to Apple for review. We are extremely proud of the work we have done and can’t wait for everyone out there to get an opportunity to play it. To celebrate we’re going to embed yet another awesome nutshot video here for you to watch. You’ll just have to be patient to see the final version of the game.

Thanks to everyone who helped us along the way. This was a heroic effort and we couldn’t have done it without your support.

It is a sad day in the land of Ow My Balls. Because of the memory management challenges we’ve decided to remove videos from the game. This was originally an important part of the game but now not so much so. Maybe that’s cause I’ve seen all the videos 50 times and they aren’t funny anymore. This is certainly disappointing, but with them the game is much more likely to crash, and we just can’t have that. The good news is that we can now share all of the videos we picked out here on the blog. So get ready for even more nutshot posts, starting with this – our absolute favorite, and the first one that you would have unlocked in the game.

Oh damn, it’s so good YouTube won’t let us embed it. So you’ll have to watch ithere.

So the problem started small. Every once in a while the game would double in speed. Then we dug deeper and deeper and finally found the root of the problem. I’ve failed to manage memory. I’ve been used to programming in high level languages like C#, Java, and Ruby where memory management is much less of a consideration. Here on the iPhone and iPod Touch, it’s everything. There’s apparently a memory limit that when you cross it the system starts to act all funky. It’s at about 22MB. So I guess that makes 22MB the new 640k. Feeling a little lost but hopeful we’ll be able to clean this up quickly enough. Some of the mistakes I’ve made are obvious, but others I’m going to need some help on. Everything is going to be OK. Really.

After a bunch of playtesting we decided that we really need to change up the positions of the buildings in the background. The initial area just has way too much open space and we need to fill it in. So Tim has made a heroic effort and completely reworked the backdrop in almost no time. Much respekt. Check out this video.

Whoever said that the last 10% is 90% of the work is wrong. It’s 99% of the work. That’s cool though especially when you’re making a game about people getting kicked in the balls. So we keep cranking like mad through the polish stage getting ever so closer to shipping. Our goal has been to ship this Sunday March 15th and at the moment we’re on track to making that happen. Can’t wait to get this out!

The playtest went awesome. The best way to learn if your app is working or not is to watch people use it. Got a lot of great feedback and ideas from people. Some of the stuff was easy, some was hard, but the bottom line was people did like what we had so far. I’m going to be cramming to make a bunch of adjustments based on the feedback we got. Thank you to everyone who came and especially those who played the game for more than 15 seconds.

Just got the first drop of character animations from Tim. Friggin awesome. Dropped them in and the game is way better. It would have sucked if we did the playtest with a stick figure.

Going balls to the wall for the playtest. Cramming like nothing else. By the way did you know that the statement “balls to the wall” is not actually in reference to balls? It refers to airplane pilots pressing the ball of the throttle against the wall of the front of the plane.